Defenders of “PRISM” say it stopped subway bombings. But British and American court documents suggest old-fashioned police work nabbed Zazi.

Would-be subway bomber Najibullah Zazi. Image by Marc Piscotty / Getty Images

Defenders of the American government’s online spying program known as “PRISM” claimed Friday that the suddenly controversial secret effort had saved New York City’s subways from a 2009 terrorist plot led by a young Afghan-American, Najibullah Zazi.

But British and American legal documents from 2010 and 2011 contradict that claim, which appears to be the latest in a long line of attempts to defend secret programs by making, at best, misleading claims that they were central to stopping terror plots. While the court documents don’t exclude the possibility that PRISM was somehow employed in the Zazi case, the documents show that old-fashioned police work, not data mining, was the tool that led counterterrorism agents to arrest Zazi. The public documents confirm doubts raised by the blogger Marcy Wheeler and the AP’s Adam Goldman, and call into question a defense of PRISM first floated by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, who suggested that PRISM had stopped a key terror plot.

Reuters’s Mark Hosenball advanced the claim Friday, based on anonymous “government sources”:

A secret U.S. intelligence program to collect emails that is at the heart of an uproar over government surveillance helped foil an Islamist militant plot to bomb the New York City subway system in 2009, U.S. government sources said on Friday.

The sources said Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, was talking about a plot hatched by Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born U.S. resident, when he said on Thursday that such surveillance had helped thwart a significant terrorist plot in recent years.

President Barack Obama’s administration is facing controversy after revelations of details of massive programs run by the National Security Agency for collecting information from telephone and Internet companies.

The surveillance program that halted the Zazi plot was one that collected email data on foreign intelligence suspects, a U.S. government source said.

The New York Times also emphasized the Zazi case Friday:

To defenders of the N.S.A., the Zazi case underscores how the agency’s Internet surveillance system, called Prism, which was set up over the past decade to collect data from online providers of e-mail and chat services, has yielded concrete results.

“We were able to glean critical information,” said a senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It was through an e-mail correspondence that we had access to only through Prism.”

But public — though not widely publicized — details of the Zazi plot cast into doubt the notion that a data mining program had much to do with the investigation. Zazi traveled to Pakistan in 2008 to train with al Qaeda. He was charged in 2009 with leading two other men in a plot to detonate suicide bombs in the New York subways.

The path to his capture, according to the public records, began in April 2009, when British authorities arrested several suspected terrorists. According to a 2010 ruling from Britain’s Special Immigration Appeals Commission, one of the suspects’ computers included email correspondence with an address in Pakistan.

The open case is founded upon a series of emails exchanged between a Pakistani registered email account sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com and an email account admittedly used by Naseer humaonion@yahoo.com between 30 November 2008 and 3 April 2009. The Security Service’s assessment is that the user of the sana_pakhtana account was an Al Qaeda associate…”

“For reasons which are wholly set out in the closed judgment, we are sure satisfied to the criminal standard that the user of the sana_pakhtana account was an Al Qaeda associate,” the British court wrote.

Later that year, according to a transcript of Zazi’s July, 2011 trial, Zazi emailed his al Qaeda handler in Pakistan for help with the recipe for his bombs. He sent his inquiry to the same email address: sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com.

An FBI agent, Eric Jurgenson, testified, “I was notified, I should say. My office was in receipt of several e-mail messages, e-mail communications.” Those emails — from Zazi to the same sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com — “led to the investigation,” he testified.

The details of terror investigations are not always laid out this clearly in public; but they appear to belie the notion, advanced by anonymous government officials Friday, that sweeping access to millions of email accounts played an important roil in foiling the subway attack. Instead, this is the sort investigation made possible by ordinary warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; authorities appear simply to have been monitoring the Pakistani email account that had been linked to terrorists earlier that year.

This was, in fact, reported at the time. That November, British authorities were bragging to the Telegraph about their role in arresting Zazi:

The plan, which reportedly would have been the biggest attack on America since 9/11, was uncovered after Scotland Yard intercepted an email….The alleged plot was unmasked after an email address that was being monitored as part of [the 2009 U.K. case] was suddenly reactivated.

The existence of PRISM was revealed Thursday by the Washington Post and the Guardian. Authorities are now scrambling to justify the program.

posted on June 7, 2013 at 10:21pm EDT

Ben Smith
BuzzFeed Staff

Find this story at 7 June 2013

Copyright © 2013 BuzzFeed, Inc.

European authorities have known since mid-2011 that the US could conduct surveillance on EU citizens. But experts say that European countries had little interest in picking a fight with their ally in Washington.
There has been widespread outrage in Europe over the scope of the National Security Agency’s PRISM surveillance program. European experts, however, are not surprised by American whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations.
“What Snowden revealed about PRISM was already known to certain well-connected people for a long time,” Benjamin Bergemann, the author of the German blog netzpolitik.org and a member of the Digitale Gesellschaft (Digital Society) e.V., told DW.
The European Parliament commissioned a report in 2012, which showed that US authorities could theoretically access European citizens’ data since 2008. The report’s authors were hard on European authorities.
In the EU, there was no awareness that mass political surveillance was possible, according to the authors of the study. Incredibly, since 2011 “neither the EU Commission nor the national lawmakers nor the European Parliament had any knowledge of FISAAA 1881a.”
FISAAA 1881a refers to a section of a 2008 amendment to the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. That section of the 2008 amendment empowers US spy agencies to collect information stored in American cloud computing providers.
The authors of the EU study warned that US authorities had access to the data of non-US citizens in these so-called data clouds. The EU was neglecting to protect its citizens, according to the report’s devastating conclusion.

Focus on China and Russia

Europeans had long invested their energy in the fight for consumer protection in the Internet and against cyber crime, according to Julien Jeandesboz of the Centre d’Etudes sur les Conflits. Jeandesboz said that the focus in the EU was not on state-sponsored threats to its citizens.
The Europeans debated about hackers, identity theft, and the regulation of Internet companies. And in the rare moments when the discussion did turn to state-sponsored activities, the EU’s attention was focused on China and Russia.
Jeandesboz believes that political motivations explain the EU’s blind eye to US spy activities. The Patriot Act, which gave Washington broad wiretapping authority after the September 11, 2001 attacks, was controversial and publicly discussed in the EU. But while it’s one thing to target cyber criminals, it’s totally different to move against the US government, according to Jeandesboz.
For most European governments, the US is an important ally and trade partner as well as the world’s leading Internet provider.

European intelligence agencies complicit?

According to Britain’s Guardian newspaper, European intelligence agencies may have profited from the Americans’ surveillance activities. The Guardian reported that Britain’s equivalent to the NSA, the GCHQ, appears to have made use of American intelligence gleaned from PRISM.
Every European user of Facebook and Google should be aware that their data may be subject to PRISM, said blogger Benjamin Bergemann.
“One could say, ‘what interest does the US have in me?’ But one should not forget that the European criminal justice systems have an interest in such surveillance and so a coalition of interests could form,” Bergemann said.

EU citizens’ rights violated

While Internet users in Europe can sue in court for the control of their own data, no such legal right exists in the US. And European law is at a loss when it comes to transnational data transfers.
According to Nicolas Hernanz, many laws that are passed in the US now also affect EU citizens. Hernanz, with the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels, said that Europeans’ legal right to control their own personal data is being “thrown in the garbage can” as a result of US surveillance activities.
US lobbyists have managed numerous times to water down tough data protection provisions in EU treaties, according to Bergemann. He hopes that the importance of data protection and privacy will be reflected in pending EU legislative initiatives.
Jeandesboz believes that if the revelations about PRISM cannot move the EU to act, then nothing can. While experts thought that such sweeping surveillance was possible, it was not considered likely. Jeandesboz said that Europeans need to stand up for their legal tradition in the face of the US. Otherwise, more civil liberties could be sacrificed for security, he continued.
“The fear of terrorism and the preventative security concept have reached their high point,” said blogger Benjamin Bergemann.

Data protection directive

There are many proposals for how the EU can protect its citizens from US surveillance. But there is little unity in the 27-member bloc. A data protection directive, which is supposed to be passed before the 2014 EU elections, has been vigorously debated.
EU parliamentarians have proposed several changes to the directive. One proposal would flag American web services, warning EU users that the site is governed by US law and could be under the control of US authorities. Another proposal would extend protection to the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Disturbing trends in Europe

At the very least, political pressure could be placed on the US, if Washington was forced to sign a law enforcement treaty with the EU. But not even that exists at the moment. And experts warn that pointing the finger across the pond is not enough.
Within the EU, there has to be a discussion about whether or not data protection should be sacrificed to counterterrorism, the experts say. The concept of preventive security is becoming more prominent in the 27-member bloc, according to Bergemann.
“The telecommunications providers have been forced to set up an electronic interface for the authorities, so that IP addresses can be retrieved,” Bergemann said. “These trends also exist in Europe.”

Deutsche Welle
11.06.2013
Nina Haase

Find this story at 11 June 2013

© 2013 Deutsche Welle

The recent confirmation that NSA is performing data mining on the telephone records of Americans raises an important question for Canadians, is CSE likewise mining the call records of people in Canada?

The short answer is I don’t know. But there are some telling indications that CSE is interested in undertaking such monitoring and that it may well be doing it to one degree or another.

First, let’s look at the program in the U.S. From the original Guardian report and subsequent revelations (see, for example, Shane Harris, “What We Know About the NSA Metadata Program,” Dead Drop blog, 6 June 2013) we now know quite a lot about the NSA’s domestic phone records monitoring program, including the following features about it:
Current procedures date from 2006, but the program began shortly after 9/11
Entails data mining of nationwide telephone call records
Focus on metadata, not content
Network analysis involved
Undertaken as part of counter-terrorism effort
Now consider this description of data mining research conducted in 2006 by CSE and the Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems (MITACS) project, a Canadian network of academia, industry, and the public sector (originally posted here but subsequently removed; archived version here; first blogged by me here):
As part of ongoing collaborations with the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), we are applying unsupervised and semi-supervised learning methods to understand transactions on large dynamic networks, such as telephone and email networks. When viewed as a graph, the nodes correspond to individuals that send or receive messages, and edges correspond to the messages themselves. The graphs we address can be observed in real-time, include from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of nodes, and feature thousands to millions of transactions. There are two goals associated with this project: firstly, there is the semi-supervised learning task, and rare-target problem, in which we wish to identify certain types of nodes; secondly, there is the unsupervised learning task of detecting anomalous messages. For reasons of efficiency, we have restricted our attention to meta-data of message transactions, such as the time, sender, and recipient, and ignored the contents of messages themselves. In collaboration with CSE, we are studying the problem of counter-terrorism, a semi-supervised problem in which some terrorists in a large network are labeled, but most are not…. Another common feature of counter-terrorism problems is the fact that large volumes of data are often “streamed” through various collection sites, in order to provide maximal information in a timely fashion. A consequence of efficient collection of transactions on very large graphs is that the data itself can only be stored for a short time. This leads to a nonstandard learning problem, since most learning algorithms assume that the full dataset can be accessed for training purposes. Working in conjunction with CSE, we will devise on-line learning algorithms that scale efficiently with increasing volume, and need only use each example once. [Emphasis added.]
Note these features:
Applicable to telephone and email networks
Thousands to millions of transactions
Metadata, not content, examined
Counter-terrorism related

Familiar looking?

Consider also this comment made by then-CSE Chief John Adams to the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence on 30 April 2007:
What is your interpretation of intercept, if I were to ask? If you asked me, it would be if I heard someone talking to someone else or if I read someone’s writing. An intercept would not be to look on the outside of the envelope. That is not an intercept to me. Unfortunately, that is not everyone’s interpretation of intercept, so the suggestion is that we should define that in the legislation…. Intercept is defined in another piece of legislation, and that is where people would probably look if they were searching for a definition of intercept. They are saying that could be troublesome for us, so we had better define it in our act to avoid that problem. That sort of thing has not come up as an issue, but it could.

As I noted in an earlier post, that sounds an awful lot like something you would say if you wanted to collect phone call metadata (number called, duration of call, etc.) and similar addressing information for e-mails and other communications — and felt you already had the legal basis to do so.

Would such monitoring be legal in Canada? I don’t know. (Usual disclaimer about not being a lawyer applies.)

Michael Geist suggests that s. 21 of the CSIS Act might be used to authorize the activity; CSE’s participation would then be based on CSIS’s authority.

Another possibility is that CSE might consider its foreign intelligence mandate (processing the records as part of the hunt for foreign terrorists) sufficient to authorize such monitoring. It is possible that this somewhat cryptic passage in the CSE oversight commissioner’s 2010-11 Annual Report is referring in whole or in part to such activities:

CSEC conducts a number of activities for the purposes of locating new sources of foreign intelligence. When other means have been exhausted, CSEC may use information about Canadians when it has reasonable grounds to believe that using this information may assist in identifying and obtaining foreign intelligence. CSEC conducts these activities infrequently, but they can be a valuable tool in meeting Government of Canada intelligence priorities. CSEC does not require a ministerial authorization to conduct these activities because they do not involve interception of private communications. However, a ministerial directive provides guidance on the conduct of these activities.

In recent years, three reviews have involved some degree of examination of these activities: a Review of CSEC’s foreign intelligence collection in support of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) (Phase II) (2006); a Review of CSEC’s activities carried out under a (different) ministerial directive (2008); and a Review of CSEC’s support to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) (2008).

In his 2006–2007 Annual Report, the late Commissioner Gonthier questioned whether the foreign signals intelligence part of CSEC’s mandate (part (a) of its mandate) was the appropriate authority in all instances for CSEC to provide support to the RCMP in the pursuit of its domestic criminal investigations. In his 2007–2008 Annual Report, Commissioner Gonthier stated that pending a re-examination of the legal issues raised, no assessment would be made of the lawfulness of CSEC’s activities in support of the RCMP under the foreign signals intelligence part of CSEC’s mandate. He also noted that CSEC’s support to CSIS raised similar issues. Commissioner Gonthier emphasized that although he was in agreement with the advice that the Department of Justice had provided to CSEC, he questioned which part of CSEC’s mandate — part (a) or part (c), the assistance part of CSEC’s mandate — should be used as the proper authority for conducting the activities.

Subsequent to these reviews and statements in the annual reports, the Chief of CSEC suspended these activities. CSEC then made significant changes to related policies, procedures and practices.

Review rationale

These activities involve CSEC’s use and analysis of information about Canadians for foreign intelligence purposes. Specific controls are placed on these activities to ensure compliance with legal, ministerial and policy requirements. Major changes to certain policies, procedures and practices have recently occurred. This was the first review of these activities since the Chief of CSEC allowed their resumption under new policies and procedures.

None of the above proves that CSE has been analyzing Canadians’ call records. But with NSA examining U.S. records, you can bet that CSE at the very least has taken a good, hard look at the possibility of doing the same in Canada. And some of the above certainly suggests that they may have gone well beyond just considering the possibility.

When the question of whether CSE was data mining Canadian call records came up in 2006, CSE was quick to make a perhaps carefully worded denial. This time around, not so much (Mitch Potter & Michelle Shephard, “Canadians not safe from U.S. online surveillance, expert says,” Toronto Star, 7 June 2013):

the Toronto Star contacted CSEC for comment Friday about its own metadata collection program, but received a boilerplate statement stressing that the agency is “prohibited by law from directing its activities at Canadians anywhere in the world or at any person in Canada” and “operates within all Canadian laws.”

“The Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) cannot comment on its methods, operations and capabilities. To do so would undermine CSEC’s ability to carry out its mandate. It would also be inappropriate to comment on the activities or capabilities of our allies,” the statement said.

Which doesn’t prove anything either.

[Update 10 June 2013: But it would appear that this article does prove that metadata monitoring is being done: Colin Freeze, “Data-collection program got green light from MacKay in 2011,” Globe and Mail, 10 June 2013.]

Sunday, June 09, 2013

Find this story at 9 June 2013

Disclosure triggers civil liberties storm as the information-sharing agreement had not been made known to Parliament or the public as accusations raise ethical and legal concerns over direct access to ‘millions’ of web users

A report by GCHQ to Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee on the listening agency’s links to a secret US spy programme is due shortly.

The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) will receive a report on claims that it received material through the secret Prism scheme “very shortly”, according to chairman Sir Malcolm Rifkind.

“The ISC is aware of the allegations surrounding data obtained by GCHQ via the US Prism programme,” Sir Malcolm said.

“The ISC will be receiving a full report from GCHQ very shortly and will decide what further action needs to be taken as soon as it receives that information.”

This development came after allegations that thousands of Britons could have been spied on by GCHQ under a “chilling” link to a secret American operation covertly collecting data from the world’s largest internet companies.

David Cameron and Theresa May, the Home Secretary, faces cross-party demands to spell out details of links between the electronic eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham and the previously-unknown Prism programme operated by the National Security Agency (NSA).

The disclosure triggered a civil liberties storm as the information-sharing agreement had not been made known to Parliament or the public.

Ms May, who is determined to revive her own “snoopers’ charter” plans to require telecoms companies to collect data about people’s internet habits, will be confronted by MPs over the claims in the Commons on Monday.

Under Prism, American agents were able to glean data, including the contents of emails and web-chats, direct from the servers of major providers including Facebook, Google and Yahoo.

It emerged that some of the information had been passed to GCHQ, raising fears that the agency had been sidestepping the usual legal process for requesting intelligence material about UK nationals. The agency insists it operates within a “strict legal and policy framework”.

According to documents, GCHQ received 197 intelligence reports through the Prism system in the 12 months to May 2012, a rise of 137 per cent on the previous year.

Keith Vaz, the chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, said he was writing to Ms May to demand an explanation.

He said: “I am astonished by these revelations which could involve the data of thousands of Britons. The most chilling aspect is that ordinary American citizens and potentially British citizens too were apparently unaware that their phone and online interactions could be watched. This seems to be the snooper’s charter by the back door.”

The existence of the Prism programme was revealed by the Washington Post and the Guardian, which obtained a copy of a presentation to NSA agents on the extent of its reach.

Further classified documents released yesterday pointed to the British link, noting that “special programmes exist for GCHQ for focused Prism processing”, suggesting the agency may have been making requests for specific information.

A GCHQ spokesman said: “Our work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Intelligence and Security Committee.”

A Government spokesman said he would “neither confirm nor deny” the claims about GCHQ and refused to disclose whether the subject was being discussed with the US authorities.

However, the senior Conservative MP, David Davis, said it was difficult to reconcile GCHQ’s statement that it was subject to proper scrutiny with Parliament’s ignorance of the programme.

He said: “In the absence of parliamentary knowledge approval by a secretary of state is a process of authorisation, not a process of holding to account. Since nobody knew it was happening at all there is no possibility of complaint.”

The Liberal Democrat MP Julian Huppert said he would be tabling a series of parliamentary questions about the GCHQ revelations on Monday and would be calling for a Commons statement from Ms May.

He said: “We have to understand exactly what information they have had and what the safeguards are. It’s deeply, deeply alarming.”

The controversy has added to the pressure on Nick Clegg from Liberal Democrats not to allow Ms May to revive the “snooper’s charter” after the Woolwich terrorist attack. Gareth Epps, co-chair the Social Liberal Forum, said: “Instead of Theresa May forcing through expensive and intrusive legislation, there should be statement by the Government on the purpose and scope of data harvesting of British citizens under Prism.”

Concerns about the disclosures were also raised by the Information Commissioner’s Office. A spokesman said: “There are real issues about the extent to which US law enforcement agencies can access personal data of UK and other European citizens. Aspects of US law under which companies can be compelled to provide information to US agencies potentially conflict with European data protection law, including the UK’s own Data Protection Act.”

Nick Pickles of the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch said questions needed to be asked at the “highest levels” to establish whether British citizens had had their privacy breached “without adherence to the proper legal process or any suspicion of wrongdoing”.

James Blessing, chief technology officer of ISP Keycom, and a council member of the Internet Service Providers’ Association, described the leaked document describing the NSA programme as “really quite scary”.

He said: “If, as this document claims, the NSA has direct access to those servers – unfettered, unbroken access – the NSA can see anything anyone in the UK is doing without any safeguards or controls. It’s been shown that if people have unfettered access they have a propensity to go and look, they can’t help themselves and they will go and find things.”

Whitehall sources said established channels had long been used by GCHQ to request information from the US. However, that the UK service had no direct access to Prism or any similar intelligence gathering systems of the NSA. There were no UK personnel present even as part of any exchange programme when the system may have been used, they claimed.

According to US sources what is called telephone “metadata” gathered from the mobile telephone records of customers of Verizon by the NSA was almost certainly been passed on to GCHQ, although what was released remained at the discretion of the Americans.

Nigel Morris, Kim Sengupta, Ian Burrell
Saturday, 8 June 2013

Find this story at 8 June 2013

© independent.co.uk

Exclusive: UK security agency GCHQ gaining information from world’s biggest internet firms through US-run Prism programme

Documents show GCHQ (above) has had access to the NSA’s Prism programme since at least June 2010. Photograph: David Goddard/Getty Images

The UK’s electronic eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, has been secretly gathering intelligence from the world’s biggest internet companies through a covertly run operation set up by America’s top spy agency, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The documents show that GCHQ, based in Cheltenham, has had access to the system since at least June 2010, and generated 197 intelligence reports from it last year.

The US-run programme, called Prism, would appear to allow GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company based outside the UK.

The use of Prism raises ethical and legal issues about such direct access to potentially millions of internet users, as well as questions about which British ministers knew of the programme.

In a statement to the Guardian, GCHQ, insisted it “takes its obligations under the law very seriously”.

The details of GCHQ’s use of Prism are set out in documents prepared for senior analysts working at America’s National Security Agency, the biggest eavesdropping organisation in the world.

Dated April this year, the papers describe the remarkable scope of a previously undisclosed “snooping” operation which gave the NSA and the FBI easy access to the systems of nine of the world’s biggest internet companies. The group includes Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Skype.

The documents, which appear in the form of a 41-page PowerPoint presentation, suggest the firms co-operated with the Prism programme. Technology companies denied knowledge of Prism, with Google insisting it “does not have a back door for the government to access private user data”. But the companies acknowledged that they complied with legal orders.

The existence of Prism, though, is not in doubt.

Thanks to changes to US surveillance law introduced under President George W Bush and renewed under Barack Obama in December 2012, Prism was established in December 2007 to provide in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information about foreigners overseas.

The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US.

The documents make clear the NSA has been able to obtain unilaterally both stored communications as well as real-time collection of raw data for the last six years, without the knowledge of users, who would assume their correspondence was private.

The NSA describes Prism as “one of the most valuable, unique and productive accesses” of intelligence, and boasts the service has been made available to spy organisations from other countries, including GCHQ.

It says the British agency generated 197 intelligence reports from Prism in the year to May 2012 – marking a 137% increase in the number of reports generated from the year before. Intelligence reports from GCHQ are normally passed to MI5 and MI6.

The documents underline that “special programmes for GCHQ exist for focused Prism processing”, suggesting the agency has been able to receive material from a bespoke part of the programme to suit British interests.

Unless GCHQ has stopped using Prism, the agency has accessed information from the programme for at least three years. It is not mentioned in the latest report from the Interception of Communications Commissioner Office, which scrutinises the way the UK’s three security agencies use the laws covering the interception and retention of data.

Asked to comment on its use of Prism, GCHQ said it “takes its obligations under the law very seriously. Our work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the intelligence and security committee”.

The agency refused to be drawn on how long it had been using Prism, how many intelligence reports it had gleaned from it, or which ministers knew it was being used.

A GCHQ spokesperson added: “We do not comment on intelligence matters.”

The existence and use of Prism reflects concern within the intelligence community about access it has to material held by internet service providers.

Many of the web giants are based in the US and are beyond the jurisdiction of British laws. Very often, the UK agencies have to go through a formal legal process to request information from service providers.

Because the UK has a mutual legal assistance treaty with America, GCHQ can make an application through the US department of justice, which will make the approach on its behalf.

Though the process is used extensively – almost 3,000 requests were made to Google alone last year – it is time consuming. Prism would appear to give GCHQ a chance to bypass the procedure.

In its statement about Prism, Google said it “cares deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data”.

Several senior tech executives insisted they had no knowledge of Prism or of any similar scheme. They said they would never have been involved in such a programme.

“If they are doing this, they are doing it without our knowledge,” one said. An Apple spokesman said it had “never heard” of Prism.

In a statement confirming the existence of Prism, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence in the US, said: “Information collected under this programme is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.”

A senior US administration official said: “The programme is subject to oversight by the foreign intelligence surveillance court, the executive branch, and Congress. It involves extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to ensure that only non-US persons outside the US are targeted, and that minimise the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about US persons.”

Nick Hopkins
guardian.co.uk, Friday 7 June 2013 14.27 BST

Find this story at 7 June 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Data on U.S. customers, secretly collected from phone companies, has been shared with British security agencies, writes Eli Lake. Plus, everything you need to know about the NSA Spying Program.

At least one foreign government has gained access to sensitive data collected by the National Security Agency from U.S. telecommunications companies in dragnet court warrants demanding the secret transfer of U.S. customers’ calling records.

The information collected by the NSA, known as “metadata,” does not include the content of the phone calls or the names of the people associated with the accounts. But it does tell the government when calls were made, what numbers were dialed, and the location and duration of those calls. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the longstanding program to collect metadata from American telecommunications and Internet companies tell The Daily Beast that, in a few discreet cases, the NSA has shared unedited analysis of these records with its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

The Guardian on Friday reported that documents the newspaper obtained showed the GCHQ in 2010 gained access to an NSA metadata collection program known as Prism to secretly tap into the servers of leading internet companies such as Apple and Google. The documents showed the British generated 197 intelligence reports from access to the system in 2012, the Guardian reported.

Late Thursday, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, issued a statement defending the government’s collection of phone records, which he said protected the privacy of most Americans. For example, Clapper said only specially trained personnel could access the vast database of metadata collected by the government. A secret body known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court reviews the program every 90 days and only allows the government to query the database “when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization.”

Clapper was responding to an article The Guardian published Wednesday based on a secret court order that demanded Verizon Business Network Services Inc. hand over to the federal government all “metadata” from its customers between April 25 and July 19. On Thursday the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees said the program had been in place since 2006, and the court order disclosed by The Guardian was a routine request by the government for the caller records. The Washington Post on Thursday disclosed that the NSA has also run a separate monitoring program to tap directly into the servers of nine U.S. Internet companies to extract information from users, ranging from video and audio files to emails.

With advances in computer science, intelligence services can now mine vast amounts of data collected by telecom companies, Internet service providers, and social-media sites for patterns that can illuminate terrorist networks and help solve crimes. Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told reporters that he knew of one instance where the NSA metadata program thwarted a domestic terrorist attack.

‘Somebody’s gotta go to jail for something!’ Watch these amateur Internet pundits scold the NSA.
These metadata, these intelligence officers say, reside in vast hard drives that belong to the NSA. Analysts there can then take a phone number or email address and uncover suspected terrorists’ associates, find their locations, and even learn clues about their possible targets.

Peter Wood, the CEO of First Base Technologies, a security firm that works closely with British law enforcement in this area, says this kind of “big data” analysis can be useful to federal law enforcement.

“All emails have headers, which are full of information most people don’t see,” Wood says. “It allows law enforcement to trace the root and source of emails—that gives them the provenance of an email. This allows them to determine the physical origin of threats, if they can be sure the source of the email has not, in turn, been compromised itself.” Wood compared the analysis to how commercial Internet companies use similar data to target ads to individuals based on their search patterns.

“The big open question is what happens to this data when it’s collected.”
Sometimes, the analysis of metadata is shared between allied services, current and retired U.S. intelligence officers say. This is particularly true with the GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA.

One former senior U.S. intelligence official with knowledge of the program tells The Daily Beast, “My understanding is if the British had a phone number, we might run the number through the database for them and provide them with the results.”

“I do not know of cases where the U.S. government has shared this kind of metadata with the United Kingdom, but I would be surprised if this never happened,” Wood says. “Both countries cooperate very closely on counterterrorism.”

The U.S. and the U.K. have an agreement to share signal intercepts and electronic intelligence through a pact known as the United Kingdom United States of America Agreement. Over the years, the agreement has been expanded to include Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

U.S. intelligence officials who spoke to The Daily Beast said that British nationals were not permitted to sit at the actual terminals where NSA analysts mine the metadata collected from phone companies and Internet service providers. But British GCHQ has received unredacted analysis of targeted searches, according to these sources.

A spokeswoman for the NSA declined to comment for this article.

“The whole idea of sharing information that could be of value in a terrorism investigation would be a high priority, especially after 9/11,” says James Bamford, the author of three histories of the NSA, including his most recent book, The Shadow Factory. “If the United States feels it got the information legally, which it does in this case, then from all I know the NSA believes it has the authority to pass the intelligence on to intelligence partners.”

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, says he is worried about what becomes of the records collected by the NSA. “The big open question is what happens to this data when it’s collected,” Jaffer says. “Is it shared amongst agencies? Is it used in law-enforcement investigations? Has it been used in prosecutions? And has it been shared with foreign countries—and which foreign countries has it been shared with and under what conditions?”

The Daily Beast
by Eli Lake Jun 7, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

Find this story at 7 June 2013

© 2013 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC

American telecoms giant Verizon has been handing information about British companies to the US government, putting it on a collision course with UK regulators.
On Verizon’s UK website, the company makes a point of telling customers it will help to defend them against spying by government agencies Photo: AP

The company has found itself at the centre of a major scandal in the US, after it emerged that the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting the telephone records of millions of customers on an “ongoing, daily basis”, under a top-secret court order issued in April.

The US is also reaching directly into the servers of Facebook, Google and other internet companies to harvest data. The NSA’s classified PRISM programme reportedly allows the government to collect virtually limitless amounts of information from emails, pictures and social media accounts.

Verizon on Thursday battled to prevent a customer backlash by telling them it had no choice in the matter. The Obama administration justified the surveillance, claiming it was a “critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats”.

Two other major American wireless providers, AT&T and Sprint, have also been receiving similar orders, as have credit card companies, sources told the Wall Street Journal.

It is not clear whether Verzion Wireless, the US wireless operator owned by Verizon and Britain’s Vodafone, has received an order. Vodafone, which owns 45pc and has no operational role in the company, had no comment on Friday.
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Verizon’s court order did not just stop at US shores. Washington called for Verizon to hand over all telephone records “for communications between the United States and abroad”, including calls routed via Verizon’s UK subsidiary, based in Reading.

On Verizon’s UK website, the company makes a point of telling customers it will help to defend them against spying by government agencies.

“Whether global or local, [your communications] must be secure because there are many threats to your organisation, from those that want to destroy your reputation and from those that want to take what’s yours,” the company says in a video entitled “2013 data breach”.

“This year’s most talked about threat is espionage… with many [breaches] tracing back to state affiliated culprits, taking months or even years to detect.”

However, the US government’s secret court order instructed Verizon to collect the numbers of the people at either end of each call, information about their location and the time and length of the conversation. It was not asked to record the actual conversations, but it was obliged to hold the information for a minimum of three months.

The Information Commissioner’s Office, the regulator responsible for safeguarding privacy in the UK, is expected to investigate the security breach.

When ordinary customers make calls out of the US, their network will connect them to the UK network they are calling, meaning Verizon has limited information about calls. However, it has comprehensive details about business customers making calls to colleagues across the Atlantic, as their calls are kept within the confines of the same network. Verizon would have pulled the information from its UK servers.

These so-called enterprise systems are theoretically designed to reduce costs and boost security.

Verizon could not be reached for comment.

Unlike the phone tracking programme, where telecom companies are forced to hand over records, PRISM appears to allow the NSA to freely search the tech firms’ networks at any time.

PRISM also allows the government access to the content of online accounts, whereas the phone programme provides data on the time and location of a call but does not tell investigators what was said.

A secret slide show obtained by The Guardian and The Washington Post appear to indicate that the nine companies are willing participants in the programme, beginning with Microsoft in 2007.

However, the Guardian reported that several of the companies claimed to have no knowledge of that their servers were being accessed by the government.

Google said in a statement: “From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data.”

An Apple spokesman said: “We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order,” he said.

The scale of the operation is detailed in a 41-page slideshow obtained by the two newspapers, which describes PRISM as the single largest source of NSA data.

By Katherine Rushton, US Business Editor

10:30AM BST 07 Jun 2013

Find this story at 7 June 2013

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

Sophisticated telecommunication interception capabilities, of the sort that was used to unravel the cricket corruption scandal, are pushing the frontiers of communications intelligence.

IN the age of digital communication, criminals are often better equipped but the line is also increasingly becoming unsafe. So, it appears, is running a large corporation, managing state secrets or just being a political dissident.

Troops on border duties, even those on counter-terrorist duties in Jammu and Kashmir, have long known what Hansie Cronje and his associates evidently did not: no means of electronic communications is safe. Radio silence is maintained during all battle-fr ont operations. In emergencies, soldiers who speak Naga, Malayalam, or other languages, unlikely to be known to Pakistani signals intelligence, are pressed into service. Pakistan troops and irregulars on the Kargil heights last summer used a bewildering mix of Drassi, Shina, and Pushto in order to confuse Indian intelligence personnel, who were then forced to trawl the Kargil area for translators.

Emerging material on interception capabilities of the United States makes clear just what the future might hold. The recently-exposed Project Echelon, for example, allows the U.S. to copy almost every piece of electronic communication worldwide: every fa x transmission, every e-mail messages, every mobile phone call, every other kind of telephone conversation.

Few analysts of the cricket corruption scandal appear to have understood the capabilities of communication intelligence. The latest episode was, in fact, preceded by a series of successful technical telecommunication interception operations. Even as Indi an Airlines Flight IC 814 was on the tarmac in Kandahar last year, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) officials had a good idea of who had carried out the hijacking, and how – thanks to a series of calls made by the Harkatul Mujahideen’s Mumbai-based opera tive, Abdul Ahmed Latif, during the course of the hijacking. Latif used a mobile telephone, and also a pay phone owned by three brothers from Jogeshwari – Rafiq Sheikh, Javed Sheikh and Muzaffar Sheikh – to remain in contact with his handlers in Karachi.

Among the calls Latif made was one to an Urdu-service staff reporter at the British Broadcasting Corporation headquarters in London, complaining about the Indian negotiators’ intransigence in Kandahar. What Latif did not know was that RAW personnel, who use sophisticated electronic equipment to scan thousands of international and domestic long-distance calls, were listening in. When RAW chief A.S. Dulat visited Jammu two days later to persuade a reluctant Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah to allow the rele ase of prisoners in exchange for the lives of the passengers on IC 814, he was able to promise rapid progress to secure justice. Working with the telephone numbers provided by RAW, Mumbai Crime Branch investigators tracked down Latif and his associates w ithin two days. Their interrogation was crucial in identifying the hijackers.

PAUL BATES / REUTERS

At Menwith Hill in the U.K., one of the data analysis centres under Project Echelon, the world’s most sophisticated intelligence gathering network. The Echelon system allows the U.S. and its associates in the controversial project to monitor almost ev ery piece of electronic communication worldwide.

Other technical operations have also been successful. In the summer of 1998, Punjab Police officials began an electronic communications sweep directed at the renewed activities of the Khalistan Liberation Force (KLF). Among the conversations that they st umbled upon were threat calls directed at affluent businessmen in Ludhiana, made by Dawood Ibrahim’s Nairobi-based associate Abu Salem, and from five unidentified mobile telephones in New Delhi. The numbers were passed on to the Delhi Crime Branch, where Inspector Ishwar Singh, responsible for the Hansie Cronje operation, was assigned charge of the investigation. The Delhi numbers were identified as belonging to the now-notorious Romesh Sharma.

By November, Delhi Police and Intelligence Bureau officials say, they held hours of taped conversations between Sharma, Abu Salem and even top businessmen like Reliance industries chief Dhirubhai Ambani. Ambani, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) offi cials now conducting the probe say, was being pressured to meet payments that two high-profile Mumbai stock brokers claimed as their dues. The deal may just have been closed had it not been for a fateful October 20 police raid on Sharma, carried out by c ity South Range officials who had no knowledge of the Crime Branch-Intelligence Bureau surveillance operation. Nothing significant has been heard of the affair since the CBI took charge, perhaps unsurprising given the agency’s track record in cases invol ving political corruption.

Other technical operations have not been quite as high profile, but they have led to significant results in combating terrorism. The five cellphone numbers provided by the Punjab Police in the Romesh Sharma case had also led, earlier that year, to the di scovery of a major arms-running operation run from New Delhi’s maximum security Tihar Jail. Punjab Police officials had begun by investigating reports that the KLF’s Harnek Singh ‘Bhap’ had entered into an alliance with jailed Uttar Pradesh mafia don Om Prakash ‘Babloo’ Shrivastav. The KLF, the force’s informants said, had agreed to provide personnel to execute a series of kidnappings to raise funds, while the Shrivastav gang in turn would be responsible for making available safehouses.

Surveillance led the Crime Branch investigators to some bizarre findings. Mobile phones activate the radio cells nearest to their users’ locations. The five cellphone numbers being monitored activated a single cell, that nearest to Tihar Jail. The Babbar Khalsa International (BKI), it transpired, had already cut a deal with criminals, using phones made available by corrupt prison administration officials, for the delivery of an explosives consignment. Delhi Police officials were waiting for the Haryana- registered truck when it arrived in New Delhi on August 12, 1998. A consignment of RDX or Research Department Explosive, weighing 18 kg, had been hiden in the space between the rim and the boot of the truck, along with four sophisticated electronic timin g devices.

Major breakthroughs based on technical operations came as early as 1996. Shortly after massive blasts occured in New Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar market on May 21, 1996, RAW made available intercepts that led the Srinagar Special Operations Group (SOG) of the Ja mmu and Kashmir Police to Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Front (JKIF) operative Farida Wani. Soon after, her boss, Hilal Baig, was shot dead by the SOG on July 17, 1996. Telephone intercepts also led the Gujarat Police to one of the JKIF’s top associates, Ahm edabad underworld baron and Dawood Ibrahim associate Abdul Rashid Latif. Latif was arrested from New Delhi by a Gujarat Police Anti-Terrorist Squad on October 10, 1996, and was killed later while attempting to escape from custody in Ahmedabad.

Although intelligence officials are unwilling to discuss details, sources say dozens of recent operations targeting the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s activities outside Jammu and Kashmir have been similarly based on communications intelligence. Khalistan terrorists have also been hit through technical means; the January 1999 arrest of a Babbar Khalsa operative who crossed over from Pakistan is one instance. In 1998, Indian intelligence personnel monitoring calls from two U.S.- based Khalistan financiers detected su ccessive calls to a mobile number in Chandigarh. Monitoring led the local police to the gates of the Burail Jail, where, it turned out, Beant Singh assassination-accused Jagtar Singh Hawara had been using the telephone not only to organise a jailbreak bu t to order pizzas, using the convenient address of the Jail Superintendent’s office.

JUST how, then, does communications intelligence work? Contrary to the popular perception, intercepting communications is fairly easy. Scanners can pluck mobile phone signals from the air, and many Western countries have an underground business in fake s ubscriber-identity cards. On August 27 last year, for example, the New York Police arrested three men who were intercepting pager messages meant for the city’s Mayor and Police Commissioner and then selling the contents to media outlets. A conference cal l between U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his party colleagues was similarly intercepted, and the transcript published in The New York Times. Commercially available equipment even allows remote espionage on the text being typed on a computer screen, or eavesdroppers to listen in to conversations being conducted over a hundred metres away.

Since 1997, however, is a growing body of material on the world’s largest and most sophisticated communications intelligence network, codenamed Echelon. Now the subject of growing controversy following revelations that Echelon was used by the U.S. for co mmercial espionage directed at its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) allies, notably France, the organisation emerged from a 1947 United Kingdom-U.S. treaty on sharing intelligence. Canada, Australia and New Zealand later joined the treaty.

Unlike routine espionage operations, Echelon does not target individual electronic communications. It instead gathers vast amounts of traffic on satellites, sub-sea cables, microwave relay stations and high frequency radio. This body of information is su bjected to computer analysis at Echelon centres around the world, notably at Menwith Hill in the U.K., Pine Gap in Australia, Buckley Field near Denver in the U.S., and Bad Aibling in Germany. The computers separate the data gathered into fax, data and v oice communication. This body of material is then subject to searches for certain key words, for example ‘atomic’ or ‘missile’, or for specific telephone numbers and e-mail addresses.

A WELTER of means is available in the Echelon system to monitor almost all long-distance electronic communication. According to a report by expert Duncan Campbell, which formed the core of discussions in the European Parliament in 1998, U.S. Central Inte lligence Agency (CIA) satellites are central to the Echelon system. Satellites of the Magnum, Orion and Rutley class can target very high frequency (VHF) radios, cellular phones, pagers and mobile data links across the globe. Since only a fraction of mic rowave signals in fact arrive at the receiving station, and the rest pass into space, such traffic is also vulnerable. Satellites of the Mercury class target microwave communications, which carry much inter-city traffic. Other satellites intercept traffi c directed at communication satellites, including the Intelsat system.

Embassies and High Commissions form a second important chain in the Echelon system. Foreign missions are located in capital cities and important business centres, which also tend to be the hub for inter-city microwave networks. Since diplomatic premises are not subject to national regulations, most missions install surveillance equipment targeted at their host countries. In some cases, Echelon systems tap directly into the telecommunications infrastructure. Campbell discovered that the Menwith Hill stat ion, for example, taps directly into the British Telecom microwave hub, which receives traffic from sub-sea transatlantic cables. Some media reports have even accused U.S.-based corporations, such as Microsoft of cooperating with their governments to bui ld surveillance mechanisms into software.

Key word searches are just one of the means through which Echelon surveillance works. Since such searches are most effective for text, there has been extensive research on software that can translate voice communications into computer-readable characters . Campbell’s report to the European Parliament suggests that such technology is, at best, of only limited reliability. There has, however, been success in the matter of voice recognition software, which enables computer systems to pick out an individual speaking through the mass of intercepted data. In theory, for example, Echelon systems could detect Osama bin Laden once he initiated a conversation.

The Echelon network is not the world’s only major intelligence gathering operation, although it is by far the world’s most sophisticated. At least 30 countries operate large-scale communications intelligence operations, including India and Pakistan. The largest are outside Echelon is the Russian FAPSI, with some 54,000 employees. China also maintains a large establishment, with two stations directed at Russia in tandem with the U.S. There are no firm figures on Echelon’s budget, but reliable estimates s uggest that over $20 billion is spent worldwide on communication intelligence-related activities. Much of India’s effort has been focussed on military-related signals intelligence, which acquires not only communications but also radar data and details of Army movements.

Nor is it clear whether fighting crime or terrorism is the sole concern of major communications intelligence organisations. The 1998 European Parliament report on electronic espionage claims that U.S. intelligence intercepted conversations between govern ment officials in Brazil and the French firm Thompson-CSF. It used the information to secure a $1.3 billion contract for Thompson-CSF’s U.S. rival, Raytheon. Mike Frost, in his book Spyworld, claims that Canadian agents tapped the U.S. Ambassador’ s conversations to undercut that country’s bid for a $2.5 billion wheat deal. Frost, himself a former operative of the Canadian communication security establishment, claims that British intelligence even invited their counterparts in Canada to place unde r surveillance two politicians suspected by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of political disloyalty.

NEW developments could push the frontiers of communications intelligence even further. In January, U.S. civil rights organisations challenged new rules which would compel telecommunications firms to provide on demand, without a warrant, the exact locatio n of mobile phone users to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The new rules, which came about as a result of the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act of 1994, would also mean that companies would have to deliver packet mode communicat ions, those used on the Internet, to the FBI. Echelon had allowed intelligence agencies to bypass laws forbidding unauthorised surveillance of U.S. and U.K. citizens by the simple expedient of asking their alliance counterparts, not bound by such laws, t o carry out the task.

There is little anecdotal material, and even less reliable literature, on the Indian capabilities in this field. It is known, for example, that intelligence agencies compelled pager and mobile phone companies to install surveillance equipment, but only o ther technical means that are at their disposal are not known. Few officials are willing to discuss the subject. Informed sources, however, told Frontline that RAW did have facilities to scan communications for key words, but that both the softwar e and the hardware used left more than a little to be desired. Its voice recognition capabilities too are relatively limited. Police organisations, for their part, have minimal access to such technology, which is limited relatively to simple operations s uch as mobile phone scanning. And while the pending Information Technology Bill of 1999 will give intelligence agencies wide powers to intercept Internet traffic, existing legal restrictions on telephone interception mean that little such evidence can be admitted to have been gathered in the first place, let alone used in trial courts.

When news of the cricket corruption scandal broke, commentators claimed variously that it was impossible to intercept mobile phone conversations or that the Delhi Police had secured a technological feat. Neither was true. Intercepting communications, voi ce or otherwise, is almost industrial in scale, more automated perhaps than any manufacturing process. Be sure when you next send an e-mail out into cyberspace that its recipient might not be the only one to read it with interest.

Volume 17 – Issue 09, Apr. 29 – May 12, 2000

PRAVEEN SWAMI

Find this story at 29 April 2000

Copyrights © 2000, Frontline.

No one is surprised that the United States uses sophisticated electronic spying techniques against its enemies. But Europeans are increasingly worried about allegations that the U.S. uses those same techniques to gather economic intelligence about its allies.

The most extensive claims yet came this spring in a report written for the European Parliament. The report says that the U.S.

National Security Agency, through an electronic surveillance system called Echelon, routinely tracks telephone, fax, and e-mail transmissions from around the world and passes on useful corporate intelligence to American companies.

Among the allegations: that the NSA fed information to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas enabling the companies to beat out European Airbus Industrie for a $ 6 billion contract; and that Raytheon received information that helped it win a $ 1.3 billion contract to provide radar to Brazil, edging out the French company Thomson-CSF. These claims follow previous allegations that the NSA supplied U.S. automakers with information that helped improve their competitiveness with the Japanese (see “Company Spies,” May/June 1994).

Is there truth to these allegations? The NSA is among the most secretive of U.S. intelligence agencies and won’t say much beyond the fact that its mission is “foreign signals intelligence.” The companies involved all refused to comment.

“Since the NSA’s collection capabilities are so grotesquely powerful, it’s difficult to know what’s going on over there,” says John Pike, an analyst at the watchdog group Federation of American Scientists, who has tracked the NSA for years.

This much is known: The NSA owns one of the largest collections of supercomputers in the world, and it’s an open secret–as documented in the European Parliament report–that Echelon vacuums up massive amounts of data from communications satellites and the Internet and then uses its computers to winnow it down. The system scans communications for keywords–“bomb,” for instance–that might tip off analysts to an interesting topic.

Fueling allegations of corporate espionage is the fact that defense contractors and U.S. intelligence agencies are linked extensively through business relationships. Raytheon, for instance, has large contracts to service NSA equipment, according to the European report.

Englishman Glyn Ford, the European Parliament member who initiated the study, wants the NSA to come clean about its activities in Europe. And the Europeans have some leverage on this issue, if they decide to use it. In a drive to improve surveillance, the United States is pressuring European governments to make telephone companies build eavesdropping capabilities into their new systems. But if that’s what the U.S. wants, says Ford, it’s going to have to be open about what information it’s collecting: “If we are going to leave the keys under the doormat for the United States, we want a guarantee that they’re not going to steal the family silver,” he says.

In the meantime, congressional critics have started to wonder if all that high-powered eavesdropping is limited to overseas snooping. In April, Bob Barr (R-Ga.), a member of the House Government Reform Committee, said he was worried by reports that the NSA was engaged in illicit domestic spying.

“We don’t have any direct evidence from the NSA, since they’ve refused to provide any reports, even when asked by the House Intelligence Committee,” Barr says. “But if in fact the NSA is pulling two million transmissions an hour off of these satellites, I don’t think there’s any way they have of limiting them to non-U.S. citizens.”

Last May, after the NSA stonewalled requests to discuss the issue, Congress amended the intelligence appropriations bill to require the agency to submit a report to Congress. (The bill is still in a conference committee.) And the NSA will face more questions when the Government Reform Committee holds hearings on Echelon and other surveillance programs.

“We ought to prevent any agency from the dragnet approach–where they throw out a net and drag anything in,” Barr says.

Kurt Kleiner
Mother Jones November 1, 1999

Find this story at 1 November 1999

Copyright © 2013 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress.

Government Tapping CONTENT, Not Just Metadata … Using Bogus “Secret Interpretation” of Patriot Act

We reported in 2008 that foreign companies have had key roles scooping up Americans’ communications for the NSA:

At least two foreign companies play key roles in processing the information.

Specifically, an Israeli company called Narus processes all of the information tapped by AT &T (AT & T taps, and gives to the NSA, copies of all phone calls it processes), and an Israeli company called Verint processes information tapped by Verizon (Verizon also taps, and gives to the NSA, all of its calls).

Business Insider notes today:

The newest information regarding the NSA domestic spying scandal raises an important question: If America’s tech giants didn’t ‘participate knowingly’ in the dragnet of electronic communication, how does the NSA get all of their data?

One theory: the NSA hired two secretive Israeli companies to wiretap the U.S. telecommunications network.

In April 2012 Wired’s James Bamford — author of the book “The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America” — reported that two companies with extensive links to Israel’s intelligence service provided hardware and software the U.S. telecommunications network for the National Security Agency (NSA).

By doing so, this would imply, companies like Facebook and Google don’t have to explicitly provide the NSA with access to their servers because major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as AT&T and Verizon already allows the U.S. signals intelligence agency to eavesdrop on all of their data anyway.

From Bamford (emphasis ours):

“According to a former Verizon employee briefed on the program, Verint, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon…

At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are powered by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004.”

Klein, an engineer, discovered the “secret room” at AT&T central office in San Francisco, through which the NSA actively “vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T” through the wiretapping rooms, emphasizing that “much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic.”

NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake corroborated Klein’s assertions, testifying that while the NSA is using Israeli-made NARUS hardware to “seize and save all personal electronic communications.”

Both Verint and Narus were founded in Israel in the 1990s.

***

“Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record,” Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California company, said. “We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.”

With a telecom wiretap the NSA only needs companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple to passively participate while the agency to intercepts, stores, and analyzes their communication data. The indirect nature of the agreement would provide tech giants with plausible deniability.

And having a foreign contractor bug the telecom grid would mean that the NSA gained access to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the U.S. without technically doing it themselves.

This would provide the NSA, whose official mission is to spy on foreign communications, with plausible deniability regarding domestic snooping.

The reason that Business Insider is speculating about the use of private Israeli companies to thwart the law is that 2 high-ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee – Senators Wyden and Udall – have long said that the government has adopted a secret interpretation of section 215 of the Patriot Act which would shock Americans, because it provides a breathtakingly wide program of spying.

Last December, top NSA whistleblower William Binney – a 32-year NSA veteran with the title of senior technical director, who headed the agency’s global digital data gathering program (featured in a New York Times documentary, and the source for much of what we know about NSA spying) – said that the government is using a secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act which allows the government to obtain:

Any data in any third party, like any commercial data that’s held about U.S. citizens ….

(relevant quote starts at 4:19).

I called Binney to find out what he meant.

I began by asking Binney if Business Insider’s speculation was correct. Specifically, I asked Binney if the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act was that a foreign company – like Narus, for example – could vacuum up information on Americans, and then the NSA would obtain that data under the excuse of spying on foreign entities … i.e. an Israeli company.

Binney replied no … it was broader than that.

Binney explained that the government is taking the position that it can gather and use any information about American citizens living on U.S. soil if it comes from:

Any service provider … any third party … any commercial company – like a telecom or internet service provider, libraries, medical companies – holding data about anyone, any U.S. citizen or anyone else.

I followed up to make sure I understood what Binney was saying, asking whether the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act was that the government could use any information as long as it came from a private company … foreign or domestic. In other words, the government is using the antiquated, bogus legal argument that it was not using its governmental powers (called “acting under color of law” by judges), but that it was private companies just doing their thing (which the government happened to order all of the private companies to collect and fork over).

Binney confirmed that this was correct. This is what the phone company spying program and the Prism program – the government spying on big Internet companies – is based upon. Since all digital communications go through private company networks, websites or other systems, the government just demands that all of the companies turn them over.

Let’s use an analogy to understand how bogus this interpretation of the Patriot Act is. This argument is analogous to a Congressman hiring a hit man to shoot someone asking too many questions, and loaning him his gun to carry out the deed … and then later saying “I didn’t do it, it was that private citizen!” That wouldn’t pass the laugh test even at an unaccredited, web-based law school offered through a porn site.

I then asked the NSA veteran if the government’s claim that it is only spying on metadata – and not content – was correct. We have extensively documented that the government is likely recording content as well. (And the government has previously admitted to “accidentally” collecting more information on Americans than was legal, and then gagged the judges so they couldn’t disclose the nature or extent of the violations.)

Binney said that was not true; the government is gathering everything, including content.

Binney explained – as he has many times before – that the government is storing everything, and creating a searchable database … to be used whenever it wants, for any purpose it wants (even just going after someone it doesn’t like).

Binney said that former FBI counter-terrorism agent Tim Clemente is correct when he says that no digital data is safe (Clemente says that all digital communications are being recorded).

Binney gave me an idea of how powerful Narus recording systems are. There are probably 18 of them around the country, and they can each record 10 gigabytes of data – the equivalent of a million and a quarter emails with 1,000 characters each – per second.

Binney next confirmed the statement of the author of the Patriot Act – Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner – that the NSA spying programs violate the Patriot Act. After all, the Patriot Act is focused on spying on external threats … not on Americans.

Binney asked rhetorically: “How can an American court [FISA or otherwise] tell telecoms to cough up all domestic data?!”

Update: Binney sent the following clarifying email about content collection:

It’s clear to me that they are collecting most e-mail in full plus other text type data on the web.

As for phone calls, I don’t think they would record/transcribe the approximately 3 billion US-to-US calls every day. It’s more likely that they are recording and transcribing calls made by the 500,000 to 1,000,000 targets in the US and the world.

Posted on June 8, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

Find this story at 8 June 2013

© 2007 – 2013 Washington’s Blog

AT&T’s central office on Folsom Street in San Francisco houses a secret room that allows the National Security Agency to monitor phone and internet traffic, according to former AT&T technician-cum-whistle-blower Mark Klein. View Slideshow

AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers’ phone calls, and shunted its customers’ internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against the company.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF’s lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptitiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants.

On Wednesday, the EFF asked the court to issue an injunction prohibiting AT&T from continuing the alleged wiretapping, and filed a number of documents under seal, including three AT&T documents that purportedly explain how the wiretapping system works.

According to a statement released by Klein’s attorney, an NSA agent showed up at the San Francisco switching center in 2002 to interview a management-level technician for a special job. In January 2003, Klein observed a new room being built adjacent to the room housing AT&T’s #4ESS switching equipment, which is responsible for routing long distance and international calls.

“I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room,” Klein wrote. “The regular technician work force was not allowed in the room.”

Klein’s job eventually included connecting internet circuits to a splitting cabinet that led to the secret room. During the course of that work, he learned from a co-worker that similar cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.

“While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet (AT&T’s internet service) circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal,” Klein wrote.

The split circuits included traffic from peering links connecting to other internet backbone providers, meaning that AT&T was also diverting traffic routed from its network to or from other domestic and international providers, according to Klein’s statement.

The secret room also included data-mining equipment called a Narus STA 6400, “known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets,” according to Klein’s statement.

Narus, whose website touts AT&T as a client, sells software to help internet service providers and telecoms monitor and manage their networks, look for intrusions, and wiretap phone calls as mandated by federal law.

Klein said he came forward because he does not believe that the Bush administration is being truthful about the extent of its extrajudicial monitoring of Americans’ communications.

“Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of this administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA’s spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA’s charter or with FISA,” Klein’s wrote. “And unlike the controversy over targeted wiretaps of individuals’ phone calls, this potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of internet communications of countless citizens.”

After asking for a preview copy of the documents last week, the government did not object to the EFF filing the paper under seal, although the EFF asked the court Wednesday to make the documents public.

One of the documents is titled “Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco,” and is dated 2002. The others are allegedly a design document instructing technicians how to wire up the taps, and a document that describes the equipment installed in the secret room.

In a letter to the EFF, AT&T objected to the filing of the documents in any manner, saying that they contain sensitive trade secrets and could be “could be used to ‘hack’ into the AT&T network, compromising its integrity.”

According to court rules, AT&T has until Thursday to file a motion to keep the documents sealed. The government could also step in to the case and request that the documents not be made public, or even that the entire lawsuit be barred under the seldom-used State Secrets Privilege.

AT&T spokesman Walt Sharp declined to comment on the allegations, citing a company policy of not commenting on litigation or matters of national security, but did say that “AT&T follows all laws following requests for assistance from government authorities.”

Ryan Singel 04.07.06

Find this story at 4 July 2006

Wired.com © 2013 Condé Nast

Israeli high-tech firms Verint and Narus have had connections with U.S. companies and Israeli intelligence in the past, and ties between the countries’ intelligence agencies remain strong.

Were Israeli companies Verint and Narus the ones that collected information from the U.S. communications network for the National Security Agency?

The question arises amid controversy over revelations that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans every day, creating a database through which it can learn whether terror suspects have been in contact with people in the United States. It also was disclosed this week that the NSA has been gathering all Internet usage – audio, video, photographs, emails and searches – from nine major U.S. Internet providers, including Microsoft and Google, in hopes of detecting suspicious behavior that begins overseas.

According to an article in the American technology magazine “Wired” from April 2012, two Israeli companies – which the magazine describes as having close connections to the Israeli security community – conduct bugging and wiretapping for the NSA.

Verint, which took over its parent company Comverse Technology earlier this year, is responsible for tapping the communication lines of the American telephone giant Verizon, according to a past Verizon employee sited by James Bamford in Wired. Neither Verint nor Verizon commented on the matter.

Natus, which was acquired in 2010 by the American company Boeing, supplied the software and hardware used at AT&T wiretapping rooms, according to whistleblower Mark Klein, who revealed the information in 2004. Klein, a past technician at AT&T who filed a suit against the company for spying on its customers, revealed a “secret room” in the company’s San Fransisco office, where the NSA collected data on American citizens’ telephone calls and Internet surfing.

Klein’s claims were reinforced by former NSA employee Thomas Drake who testified that the agency uses a program produced by Narus to save the personal electrical communications of AT&T customers.

Both Verint and Narus have ties to the Israeli intelligence agency and the Israel Defense Forces intelligence-gathering unit 8200. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the 8200 unit, told Forbes magazine in 2007 that Comverse’s technology, which was formerly the parent company of Verint and merged with it this year, was directly influenced by the technology of 8200. Ori Cohen, one of the founders of Narus, told Fortune magazine in 2001 that his partners had done technology work for the Israeli intelligence.

International intel

The question of whether intelligence communities outside the United States were involved has been raised. According to The Guardian, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Britain’s intelligence agency, secretly collected intelligence information from the world’s largest Internet companies via the American program PRISM. According to a top secret document obtained by The Guardian, GCHQ had access to PRISM since 2010 and it used the information to prepare 197 intelligence reports last year. In a statement to the Guardian, GCHQ, said it “takes its obligations under the law very seriously.”

According to The Guardian, details of GCHQ’s use of PRISM are set out in a 41-page PowerPoint presentation prepared for senior NSA analysts, and describe a “snooping” operation that gave the NSA and FBI access to the systems of nine Internet giants, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Skype.

Given the close ties between U.S. and Israeli intelligence, the question arises as to whether Israeli intelligence, including the Mossad, was party to the secret.

Obama stands by spies

At turns defensive and defiant, U.S. President Barack Obama stood by the spy programs revealed this week.

He declared Friday that his country is “going to have to make some choices” balancing privacy and security, launching a vigorous defense of formerly secret programs that sweep up an estimated 3 billion phone calls a day and amass Internet data from U.S. providers in an attempt to thwart terror attacks.

Obama also warned that it will be harder to detect threats against the United States now that the two top-secret tools to target terrorists have been so thoroughly publicized.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” Obama assured the nation after two days of reports that many found unsettling. What the government is doing, he said, is digesting phone numbers and the durations of calls, seeking links that might “identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism.” If there’s a hit, he said, “if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation.”

Tapping thwarted terror attack

While Obama said the aim of the programs is to make America safe, he offered no specifics about how the surveillance programs have done this. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., on Thursday said the phone records sweeps had thwarted a domestic terror attack, but he also didn’t offer specifics.

U.S. government sources said on Friday that the attack in question was an Islamist militant plot to bomb the New York City subway system in 2009.

Obama asserted his administration had tightened the phone records collection program since it started in the George W. Bush administration and is auditing the programs to ensure that measures to protect Americans’ privacy are heeded – part of what he called efforts to resist a mindset of “you know, `Trust me, we’re doing the right thing. We know who the bad guys are.'”

But again, he provided no details on how the program was tightened or what the audit is looking at.

Obama: 100% privacy is impossible

The furor this week has divided Congress, and led civil liberties advocates and some constitutional scholars to accuse Obama of crossing a line in the name of rooting out terror threats.

Obama, himself a constitutional lawyer, strove to calm Americans’ fears – but also remind them that Congress and the courts had signed off on the surveillance.

“I think the American people understand that there are some trade-offs involved,” Obama said when questioned by reporters at a health care event in San Jose, California.

“It’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said. “We’re going to have to make some choices as a society. And what I can say is that in evaluating these programs, they make a difference in our capacity to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity.”

Obama said U.S. intelligence officials are looking at phone numbers and lengths of calls – not at people’s names – and not listening in.

The two classified surveillance programs were revealed this week in newspaper reports that showed, for the first time, how deeply the National Security Agency dives into telephone and Internet data to look for security threats. The new details were first reported by The Guardian and The Washington Post, and prompted Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to take the unusual and reluctant step of acknowledging the programs’ existence.

Obama echoed intelligence experts – both inside and outside the government – who predicted that potential attackers will find other, secretive ways to communicate now that they know that their phone and Internet records may be targeted.

By TheMarker, Haaretz, The Associated Press and Reuters | Jun.08, 2013 | 12:41 PM | 17

Find this story at 8 June 2013

© Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd.

WASHINGTON—The National Security Agency’s monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions, said people familiar with the agency’s activities.

Jerry Seib explains how the far-reaching data collection conducted by the U.S. government includes phone companies in addition to Verizon, plus Internet service providers and Apple. Photo: Getty Images

The disclosure this week of an order by a secret U.S. court for Verizon Communications Inc.’s phone records set off the latest public discussion of the program. But people familiar with the NSA’s operations said the initiative also encompasses phone-call data from AT&T Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp., records from Internet-service providers and purchase information from credit-card providers.

The Obama administration says its review of complete phone records of U.S. citizens is a “necessary tool” in protecting the nation from terror threats. Is this the accepted new normal, or has the Obama administration pushed the bounds of civil liberties? Cato Institute Director of Information Policy Studies Jim Harper weighs in. Photo: Getty Images.

The agency is using its secret access to the communications of millions of Americans to target possible terrorists, said people familiar with the effort.

The NSA’s efforts have become institutionalized—yet not so well known to the public—under laws passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Most members of Congress defended them Thursday as a way to root out terrorism, but civil-liberties groups decried the program.
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The National Security Agency is obtaining phone records from all Verizon U.S. customers under a secret court order, according to a newspaper report and ex-officials. WSJ intelligence correspondent Siobhan Gorman joins MoneyBeat. Photo: AP.

“Everyone should just calm down and understand this isn’t anything that is brand new,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), who added that the phone-data program has “worked to prevent” terrorist attacks.

Senate Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) said the program is lawful and that it must be renewed by the secret U.S. court every three months. She said the revelation about Verizon, reported by the London-based newspaper the Guardian, seemed to coincide with its latest renewal.
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Lawmakers Push Holder for Briefing on Phone Records | More Reaction
Verizon Says Must Comply with Data Requests
Government Is Tracking Verizon Calls
NSA’s Domestic Spying Grows as Agency Sweeps Up Data (3/10/2008)
NSA Exceeds Legal Limits in Eavesdropping Program (4/16/2009)
U.S. Plans ‘Perfect Citizen’ Cyber Shield for Utilities, Companies (7/8/2010)
NSA Activities Violated Fourth Amendment Rights, Letter Discloses (7/20/2012)

Civil-liberties advocates slammed the NSA’s actions. “The most recent surveillance program is breathtaking. It shows absolutely no effort to narrow or tailor the surveillance of citizens,” said Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration acknowledged Thursday a secret NSA program dubbed Prism, which a senior administration official said targets only foreigners and was authorized under U.S. surveillance law. The Washington Post and the Guardian reported earlier Thursday the existence of the previously undisclosed program, which was described as providing the NSA and FBI direct access to server systems operated by tech companies that include Google Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Skype. The newspapers, citing what they said was an internal NSA document, said the agencies received the contents of emails, file transfers and live chats of the companies’ customers as part of their surveillance activities of foreigners whose activity online is routed through the U.S. The companies mentioned denied knowledge or participation in the program.

The arrangement with Verizon, AT&T and Sprint, the country’s three largest phone companies means, that every time the majority of Americans makes a call, NSA gets a record of the location, the number called, the time of the call and the length of the conversation, according to people familiar with the matter. The practice, which evolved out of warrantless wiretapping programs begun after 2001, is now approved by all three branches of the U.S. government.

AT&T has 107.3 million wireless customers and 31.2 million landline customers. Verizon has 98.9 million wireless customers and 22.2 million landline customers while Sprint has 55 million customers in total.

NSA also obtains access to data from Internet service providers on Internet use such as data about email or website visits, several former officials said. NSA has established similar relationships with credit-card companies, three former officials said.

It couldn’t be determined if any of the Internet or credit-card arrangements are ongoing, as are the phone company efforts, or one-shot collection efforts. The credit-card firms, phone companies and NSA declined to comment for this article.
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Though extensive, the data collection effort doesn’t entail monitoring the content of emails or what is said in phone calls, said people familiar with the matter. Investigators gain access to so-called metadata, telling them who is communicating, through what medium, when, and where they are located.

But the disconnect between the program’s supporters and detractors underscored the difficulty Congress has had navigating new technology, national security and privacy.

The Obama administration, which inherited and embraced the program from the George W. Bush administration, moved Thursday to forcefully defend it. White House spokesman Josh Earnest called it “a critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats.”

But Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.), said he has warned about the breadth of the program for years, but only obliquely because of classification restrictions.

“When law-abiding Americans call their friends, who they call, when they call, and where they call from is private information,” he said. “Collecting this data about every single phone call that every American makes every day would be a massive invasion of Americans’ privacy.”

In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, phone records were collected without a court order as a component of the Bush-era warrantless surveillance program authorized by the 2001 USA Patriot Act, which permitted the collection of business records, former officials said.

The ad hoc nature of the NSA program changed after the Bush administration came under criticism for its handling of a separate, warrantless NSA eavesdropping program.

President Bush acknowledged its existence in late 2005, calling it the Terrorist Surveillance Program, or TSP.

When Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006, promising to investigate the administration’s counterterrorism policies, Bush administration officials moved to formalize court oversight of the NSA programs, according to former U.S. officials.

Congress in 2006 also made changes to the Patriot Act that made it easier for the government to collect phone-subscriber data under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Those changes helped the NSA collection program become institutionalized, rather than one conducted only under the authority of the president, said people familiar with the program.

Along with the TSP, the NSA collection of phone company customer data was put under the jurisdiction of a secret court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to officials.

David Kris, a former top national security lawyer at the Justice Department, told a congressional hearing in 2009 that the government first used the so-called business records authority in 2004.

At the time he was urging the reauthorization of the business-records provisions, known as Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which Congress later approved.

The phone records allow investigators to establish a database used to run queries when there is “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that the records are relevant and related to terrorist activity, Ms. Feinstein said Thursday.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also issued a defense of the phone data surveillance program, saying it is governed by a “robust legal regime.” Under the court order, the data can only “be queried when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization.” When the data is searched, all information acquired is “subject to strict restrictions on handling” overseen by the Justice Department and the surveillance court, and the program is reviewed roughly every 90 days, he said. Another U.S. official said less than 1% of the records are accessed.

The database allows investigators to “map” individuals connected with that information, said Jeremy Bash, who until recently was chief of staff at the Pentagon and is a former chief counsel to the House Intelligence committee.

“We are trying to find a needle in a haystack, and this is the haystack,” Mr. Bash said, referring to the database.

Sen. Wyden on Thursday questioned whether U.S. officials have been truthful in public descriptions of the program. In March, Mr. Wyden noted, he questioned Mr. Clapper, who said the NSA did not “wittingly” collect any type of data pertaining to millions Americans. Spokesmen for Mr. Clapper didn’t respond to requests for comment.

For civil libertarians, this week’s disclosure of the court authorization for part of the NSA program could offer new avenues for challenges. Federal courts largely have rebuffed efforts that target NSA surveillance programs, in part because no one could prove the information was being collected. The government, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, has successfully used its state-secrets privilege to block such lawsuits.

Jameel Jaffer, the American Civil Liberties Union’s deputy legal director, said the fact the FISA court record has now become public could give phone-company customers standing to bring a lawsuit.

“Now we have a set of people who can show they have been monitored,” he said.

Updated June 7, 2013, 9:25 a.m. ET

By SIOBHAN GORMAN, EVAN PEREZ and JANET HOOK

—Danny Yadron and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries contributed to this article.

Find this story at 7 June 2013

Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Carlyle Group has spent years attempting to shed its image as a well-connected private equity firm leveraging Washington heavyweights in the defense sector. Instead, it nurtured a reputation as a financially sophisticated asset manager that buys and sells everything from railroads to oil refineries.

The recent disclosures involving National Security Agency surveillance on U.S. citizens by an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, a Virginia consulting firm that is majority owned by Carlyle, has thrust two of Washington’s most prominent corporate entities uncomfortably into the limelight, bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits.

Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden was fired Tuesday after he confessed to being the source of stories about NSA data collection programs. Federal investigators are examining how Snowden, who worked at an NSA facility in Hawaii and had also worked for the CIA, was able to gain access to sensitive information.

Carlyle declined to comment.

Booz Allen, based in Tysons Corner, has been a local fixture for years, employing thousands and providing management and consulting services to the government, particularly the defense and intelligence agencies. It even sponsored a local golf tournament — the Booz Allen Classic — between 2004 and 2006.

It also became a leader among the contractors supplying tens of thousands of intelligence analysts to the government in recent years, including technologists such as Snowden.

Those government contracts, and thousands more like them, in 2008 made Booz Allen a ripe acquisition target for Carlyle.

It paid $2.54 billion for Booz Allen as a deep recession took hold. Fearing the risks of taking on too much debt in the midst of a financial crisis, Carlyle put up 50 percent cash instead of its normal 30 percent. It borrowed the rest to buy the company, which was then privately held.

Upon the close of the deal, the less profitable international and commercial business was spun off to become Booz & Co., leaving Carlyle with a government-only company.

After the split, the new Booz Allen Hamilton established an incentive-based compensation structure that gave the remaining partners a stake in the firm’s success. In effect, said one person close to the deal who was not authorized to speak publicly, “you got to eat what you killed.”

The incentives helped spur profits.

“Everybody has a responsibility, depending on your title, to bring in a certain amount of business,” said William Loomis, managing director at financial services firm Stifel Nicolaus.

Booz Allen, which employs 24,500, had a net profit of $219 million on revenue of nearly $5.8 billion for the fiscal year ended March 31. For the same period ending in 2010, the year the company went public, the company earned $25 million on $5.1 billion in revenue.

George A. Price Jr., senior equity research analyst for aerospace, defense and government services at BB&T Capital Markets, said “they’ve got a great brand, they’ve focused over time on hiring top people, including bringing on people who have a lot of senior government experience.”

Carlyle has cashed in on the increased demand of Booz Allen’s services. As profits and revenue have grown, Booz Allen has borrowed money to pay dividends to shareholders, including Carlyle.

Carlyle collected nearly $550 million in dividends in 2009 alone. Last year, Booz Allen issued another special shareholder dividend valued at $765 million — most of which went to Carlyle investors.

Booz Allen went public in 2010, and Carlyle now owns 95.66 million shares — around 69 percent of the total shares outstanding — valued at about $1.66 billion at the current stock price.

As government contracting began to wane, Booz Allen has pursued commercial work and opened an office in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. The contractor, for instance, is marketing cybersecurity and other services to Middle Eastern companies and governments.

The moves are at least partly in response to federal budget cutting, which has taken a toll on the business.

“We consider ourselves a well-run company, and in the past year we’ve become even better in managing our business in a difficult market for government contracting,” Booz Allen spokesman James Fisher said.

Price, the analyst, said the company has seen revenue and profit declines more recently. “They’re not immune from the current environment,” he said, adding that the cuts the company has made have “blunted” the effect.

Carlyle may ultimately reap as much as $3 billion on its initial nearly $1 billion investment. In the end, Booz Allen is shaping up to be one of the firm’s biggest home runs.

By Thomas Heath and Marjorie Censer, Published: June 12

Find this story at 12 June 2013

© The Washington Post Company

WASHINGTON: The explosive leak uncovering America’s vast surveillance program highlights the risks Washington takes by entrusting so much of its defense and spy work to private firms, experts said on Monday.

From analyzing intelligence to training new spies, jobs that were once performed by government employees are now carried out by paid contractors, in a dramatic shift that began in the 1990s amid budget pressures.

Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old man whose leak uncovered how spy agencies sift through phone records and Internet traffic, is among a legion of private contractors who make up nearly 30 percent of the workforce in intelligence agencies.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the use of contractors boomed, as government agencies turned to private firms in the global hunt for terror suspects, touting it as a cost-effective way to avoid a permanent increase in the number of civil servants.

As a “contractor alley” rose in the suburbs of northern Virginia outside Washington, the increasing reliance on contractors by the Pentagon and spy services has often been criticized as wasteful and possibly corrupt. But some former intelligence officers and experts warn that it also opens up the spy agencies to big security risks.

The contractors who wear a “green badge” to enter government offices may lack the ethos and discretion of career intelligence officers who wear the “blue badge,” according to John Schindler, a former analyst at the National Security Agency and counterintelligence officer. In a series of tweets, Schindler, who now teaches at the Naval War College, heaped scorn on Snowden for spilling secrets.

But he said it was not surprising the disclosure came from a “green badge” holder and suggested sensitive information technology jobs should not be contracted out. “Been telling my CI (counter intelligence) peeps for years that NSA & IC ( intelligence community) only 1 disgruntled, maladjusted IT dork away from disaster (esp IT contractor)…oh well,” he wrote.

Systems administrators are the 21st century equivalent of the Cold War-era “code clerks,” he said, as they may not hold a high rank but have access to vital information.

Most contractors are former military or intelligence officers, and America’s top spy chief, James Clapper, once worked at Booz Allen Hamilton, the same firm that employed Snowden. Another former national intelligence director, Michael McConnell, also worked at the firm before and after holding the director’s post.

Booz Allen has profited heavily from intelligence work, reportedly earning $1.3 billion or 23 percent of its total revenue from contracts with spy agencies. Former CIA director and defense secretary Robert Gates has voiced concern that too much sensitive work has been farmed out to private companies.

“You want somebody who’s really in it for a career because they’re passionate about it and because they care about the country and not just because of the money,” he told the Washington Post in 2010.

A special website lists job openings for those with security credentials, clearancejobs.com, with positions advertised such as “Intelligence Analyst 3/Targeter” for Northrop Grumman.

“The primary function of a Specialized Skills Officer is to collaborate with a team of intelligence professionals in support of HUMINT operations against priority targets,” said the notice for a workplace in McLean, Virgina.

But the threat of damaging leaks may have less to do with a dependence on contractors and more to do with a younger generation’s distrust of Washington, said James Lewis, a former senior official and cyber security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Private contracting does not in and itself pose a serious threat to keeping secrets, Lewis told AFP. “It’s a risk because of the differing attitudes of generations,” he said. “People who haven’t been in the federal service for a long time, who have this view of government shaped by the popular culture are probably more inclined to do this.”

He noted that the most extensive leak of US classified documents came not from a contractor but a low-ranking soldier in the US Army, Private Bradley Manning, who is on trial on espionage charges after admitting to handing over hundreds of thousands of secret files to the WikiLeaks website.

AFP Jun 11, 2013, 04.52AM IST

Find this story at 11 June 2013

© 2013 Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd.